Hi!

Looks interesting: http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/03/02/NYT010203.html

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A War Crime or an Act of War?

By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE

MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking
smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union
address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is
assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole
villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a
familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently 
brought
 up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988,
near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has 
cited
Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to 
topple
 Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with
poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi
chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the
Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's 
senior
 political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at 
the
Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified
material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. 
In
addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight 
war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into
great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in
the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical 
weapons
to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq 
not
far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the 
misfortune
to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States
Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report,
which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know 
basis.
That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi
gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle
around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated
they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas --
which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard
gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as 
often
as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed
article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense
Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the
Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually
speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political
favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much 
to
answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing 
his
own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as
the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved
battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for 
invading
Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.



IN fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on
today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on
taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade
Iraq.

We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves
of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more
important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. 
In
addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser 
Zab
rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by
the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and
river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish
area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when 
they
seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction
of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and
Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No
progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With
Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that 
probably
could not be challenged for decades -- not solely by controlling Iraq's oil,
but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once
Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities
would open up for American companies.

All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one 
that
would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to 
Osama
bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its
neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated
condition -- thanks to United Nations sanctions -- Iraq's conventional forces
threaten no one.

Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that 
Saddam
 Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the 
most
 dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.

Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people
the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds,
it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died
fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us
proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on
human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive
regimes Washington supports?                             
                                                                              
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